KARACHI: This is with reference to the press conference by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in which he put forward conditions for signing a strategic pact with Pakistan. Afghanistan has already signed two strategic pacts: one was with India, signed in October 2011, which allows it to provide military training to the Afghan army; and the other was with the US, signed in May 2012, and it binds the US to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan till 2024.
Both these strategic agreements had no conditions attached to them. In that context, it could be said that for President Karzai to attach conditions for signing a strategic agreement with Pakistan is, perhaps, evidence of a double standard.
The reality is that Pakistan and the Central Asian states (under the influence of Russia) are not likely to permit the US to base war-fighting assets on their territories. This means that America will have to rely, either on airfields farther away in the Persian Gulf states or on American aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea. The combat basing of Predators and other strike aircraft to manage security of a post-2014 Afghanistan is a critical component of Washington’s counter-terrorism strategy in the region.
When US troops pull out of Afghanistan, the only country most suitable to guarantee and implement a security plan for Kabul will be Pakistan.
Therefore, to attach conditions before agreeing on a ‘strategic security pact’ is not only undermining the interests of both countries, but also the future of the whole region.
It is not by signing a ‘security strategic pact’ that that the two countries will become strategic allies, but rather by mutually understanding each other’s interests and also by not undermining these interests.
Afghanistan is not the victim of security failures but also of the failure of governance. The majority of Afghans have demonstrated their will to lead a peaceful and orderly life but Mr Karzai has not been able to give them this.
It is here that the failures of the Karzai government are the most obvious. If indeed, there is a single factor accounting for the growth of the insurgency, it is not the presence of foreign troops, but rather the failures of governance associated with the presidency.
Most Afghans want the Taliban cleared from their villages, but even when the villages are cleared and not held by Afghan security forces, they feel frustrated. They also have difficulty understanding why the government fails to provide the basic services that they so desperately need. In fact, most of them are as angered at the government’s incompetence as at the presence of Western troops in their country.
From the Tokyo Conference in 2002 till now, international aid in Afghanistan has poured in but according to an estimate, only half the money actually reaches the Afghan people while the rest is lost because of the burden of sustaining numerous Western consultants and a hugely corrupt bureaucracy.
The future threat to Afghanistan is mostly from within. Befriending Pakistan rather than considering it as the likely destination of emerging threats is the best option for Kabul to follow.
Lt Col (retd) Muhammad Ali Ehsan
Published in The Express Tribune, October 8th, 2012.
